I have had two of these miniwireless 22 boards for a while now. Try are the 433mhz versions and I have not had any luck with them. I started working with them months ago. I soldered on some headers and was able to program them using my FTDI cable. I found that the led was on in 9 and loaded up the blink program through the arduino IDE and it all seems good.

and opened up the example code for the client. Once loaded it failed to initialize. Looking at the serial monitor I got the following message:

RF22 init failed
Sending to rf22_server

Not very helpful. But I opened up the header files and added in some more serial print lines to try and see what was going on. I found out that the section of the library code that was the following section.

When I look at the serial output with these extra println I see that the device type returns 0. When I had problems with these boards I ordered a RFM22 shield from sparkfun. I plugged this into an arduino uno and loaded up the same code. This returns the device type to be 8. I asked in the RadioHead google group and I was told this:

"SPI read of 0 indicates that the problem appears to be that SPI comms are not
working with your radio. This is usually due to an electrical connection error
or problem. "

So I am at a loss. Has anyone used these boards before? Are my boards defective? I have emailed Anarduino but no response.

The SPI bus is shared between the Memory and the RFM22 radio.
It is important that the chip select on the Memory is NOT enabled simultaneously with the radio. I believe this is most likely the issue you are seeing.

The chip select on the Memory is the MCU gpio D5 (common between all the MiniWireless). Please make sure D5 is de-asserted while performing radio operations.
You can explicitly set this to a logic HIGH, or by configuring the internal pullup---such that, the memory won't interfere with radio operations.

Let me know if you have any further questions, and although we are quite busy, we are willing to help.